Florence versus Kuala Lumpur

Last year I was on a writers’ residency in Florence when I was called back to Malaysia to attend a family matter. I arranged for a taxi to collect me from my lodgings near Santa Croce, early that morning, to take me to the airport, where I would have to take a flight to Rome, then to Singapore and, finally, back to Kuala Lumpur.

In the hour just after dawn, the streets of the city seemed dusted with a sort of golden haze that cast every detail of their façades into relief: the ornate stone mouldings, the carvings of statues, the fine wooden decorations, all unchanged for centuries—of course restored over the years, but in such a way as to give the impression that nothing had ever changed, and that nothing ever would. Change, as far as these buildings, and this city was concerned, wasn’t something to be desired. Why would it be, given that perfection had already been reached—in an architectural sense, certainly, but also more profoundly, in the deeply-rooted feeling that a certain way of life had reached its apogee several centuries ago, with its expressions of beauty and order. 

I had not been in the country for long, yet I was already seduced by the suggestions of old European elegance. I’d spent many evenings watching the films of Italian film-makers of themid-twentieth century—Visconti, Pasolini, Antonioni, among others, in an attempt to understand the European mentality (it seemed to me) that was beginning to feel anxious about what it saw as the slow and perhaps terminal decay of society; of humankind’s disaffection with and increasing disconnect from the exterior world, caused by the rapid changes in society and technology, especially after the Second World War.

“How are individuals tied to what their societies accomplished in the past?”

Being in a city and a country that seemed eternal, and eternally preserved, I wondered what it must have been like to have grown up there; how much the unchanging nature of the streets and buildings around me would have affected my sense of how to navigate change—to navigate the past. How can you shape history when its physical expressions are all around you, impossible to alter? How much are the possibilities of individuals tied to what their societies have accomplished in the past?

Landing in Kuala Lumpur less than a day later, this question was still turning over in my head. The shock of arriving in Asia—in virtually any part of the continent—from western Europe was not a new sensation to me, yet that trip was particularly jarring for me because of the disparity between an ancient city like Florence, with its self-consciously museum-like qualities, and a city like Kuala Lumpur, fashioned around the deliberate destruction of the past. One held by its history, the other battling against it; one glorifies it, the other revolts against it. 

Built largely in the latter half of the nineteenth-century by Chinese coolies brought in by the British colonial government to work in tin mines, Kuala Lumpur today defines itself as a modern, multi-cultural metropolis in a strongly Muslim-dominated country. Its reshaping of its modern narrative began in earnest inthe early 1980s, when the country embarked on a campaign of cultural nationalism—many streets that had once carried the names of British colonial officers were renamed after prominent locals, and as the country’s economy began to grow, so too did the city. Its expansion required large areas of its downtown to be remodelled, culminating in the massive redevelopment of the race course in the middle of the city, an area fringed by old trees and colonial-era mansions, which became, in the mid-1990s, the site of the now-iconic Petronas Twin Towers that still dominate the city’s skyline. 

“The motivation was to erase reminders of our colonial past”

The destruction of many of the handsome colonial buildings, such as the Bok House mansion (which housed a legendary—and legendarily bad—French restaurant called le Coq d’Or) caused uproar among certain quarters because of the government’s apparent disregard for the city’s heritage. The reasons given for its demolition were purely commercial—the building occupied a prime piece of real estate, the city was expanding, it made no sense to maintain a failing building that served no real historical reason. But beneath these superficial reasons it wasn’t difficult to discern a deeper motivation, which was the erasure of reminders of our colonial past and replacing it with structures that reflected the way we lived now—or, rather, the way we wanted to live. Or even, the way we wanted people to think we lived. 

I took a ride-hailing car to my parents’ apartment block. The driver remarked how well-maintained the building was, despite it being‘old.’ Older blocks had the advantage of being well-ventilated, he said, despite them lacking more obvious facilities like swimming pools and gyms. The building was twenty-five years old (the one I’d been living in while in Florence was nearly four hundred years old).

On the way there we had passed through the suburb I had grown up in. I could just about discern the layout of the streets, because one or two discreet landmarks still existed—for example the house with the bizarre green-tiled porch, one of the fanciest at the time, now dwarfed by the buildings around it. Where the main car park once was, doubling up as a night market, there was now a shopping mall, whose size and approach roads distorted the layout of the entire area; distorted, too, my memoryof my life there.

“Every country in Asia has its taboo subjects, which are all in some way connected to historical traumas”

So much of our relationship with the past is connected with physical structures; confronted with these wholescale changes, I struggled to recognise the place I once had in that neighbourhood. It helped me to think of it as an entirely new place, one to be marvelled at, to be explored. Which I suppose was the aim of it in the first place. 

My parents are elderly and were not doing so well on that visit. Usually, when they are healthy, they are robust not just physically but mentally; they are products of a people who became adults just after Independence, which means they never talk about the past. But sometimes, when they are feeling frail, they occasionally recount stories of their difficult childhoods; their struggles with racism and discrimination and poverty. Some topics remain taboo completely, for example, whether or not they ever sympathised with leftists in the 1950s and 60s. The same is true for almost everyone I know.

Every country in Asia has its taboo subjects, which are all in some way connected to historical traumas, complicated issues passed down from a previous generation. To discuss them is to trouble the forward-looking energy that we have lived with these past three or four decades. Sometimes, even asking about these subjects makes me feel like a trespasser—as though I have no right to be there. It is not a generalisation to say that in most parts of Asia, the overwhelming sense is that the past should be left where it is; that the best of life lies ahead of us. Part of this forward-thinking drive involves not examining too closely who we are, or who we have been, but to concentrate on how we would like to be seen.

“Do we commemorate trauma or forget it?”

Back in Europe, I am surrounded by the converse way of thinking: how a constant examination of the past, and in particular its glories, might give people a clue as to who they are now. On a visit to France some years ago, I was struck by billboards advertising the cover of the latest issue of the right-leaning magazine Le Point—the Century of Louis XIV, “When France Dominated the World.” 

How can we recapture a vanishing past, when others are busy forgetting theirs? Do we commemorate trauma or forget it? Do we attempt to refine our past selves, or reinvent ourselves completely? Both these approaches are based on an anxiety about occupying the centre ground—on the European side a fear of losing that territory that was for so long theirs, on the Asian side the worry that they still haven’t made that ground theirs. The insecurities on both sides are scars of history, and I don’t know how they can heal.